Editor’s Note: Carolyn B. Maloney represents New York’s 12th Congressional District and is the senior woman on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. She wrote this commentary in collaboration with Democratic Reps. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Tammy Duckworth, Robin Kelly, Brenda Lawrence, Bonnie Watson Coleman and Michelle Lujan Grisham. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors.
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Seven congresswomen say John Boehner's resignation is part of the extreme right's bid to oust him over Planned Parenthood funding
They say a committee hearing Tuesday is aimed at defunding Planned Parenthood, ultimately denying women the right to choose
House Speaker John Boehner’s announcement Friday that he is resigning his post and leaving the House of Representatives was a surprise to many, but not to us.
We are seven women who serve as Democratic members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which has become ground zero in the Republican fight to defund Planned Parenthood.
Last week, we joined all of our other Democratic colleagues on the committee warning our chairman, Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, that the relentless attack on Planned Parenthood by the conservative House Freedom Caucus was in fact “part of a broader power struggle to unseat House Speaker John Boehner, led by an extreme wing of the Republican Party that is using this issue to force a government shutdown unless the Speaker bows to their demands.”
Our warning proved prescient.
More than half of the founding members of this Freedom Caucus are also on our committee. On Tuesday, they will continue their assault on Planned Parenthood, which is one of our nation’s leading providers of high-quality women’s health care.
They will make lots of arguments to justify their extreme actions, but there is one simple reason we are at this point: Republicans want to outlaw a woman’s right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy.
It is a truth we all know, and yet it somehow stays just below the surface of the public debate. It’s time we are honest about it.
Republicans say this is all about deceptive videos first released in July, made surreptitiously by an anti-abortion group and purporting to show violations of our laws on fetal tissue research – laws that were adopted with strong bipartisan support based on the work of President Reagan’s 1988 blue-ribbon panel. But when the facts that contradict their narrative come to light, it never seems to matter.
When we learned, for example, that the videos released by David Daleiden and his Center for Medical Progress had dozens of unexplained splices and edits cutting out phrases like “we’re not looking to make money from this,” that didn’t matter.
When we learned that 1% of Planned Parenthood centers had any involvement in fetal tissue donation, that didn’t matter.
When we learned that some Planned Parenthood centers involved in tissue donation took the extra precaution of accepting no reimbursement for their costs, far beyond what is even required by federal law, that didn’t matter.
When we learned that Planned Parenthood centers that lawfully accepted reimbursement recouped only their costs and repeatedly refused offers from anti-abortion extremists to entrap them into accepting far larger amounts (even, in one case, more than 10 times more), Republicans still insisted the organization was trying to profit from these donations.
The righteously indignant rhetoric we’ve heard for weeks about Planned Parenthood trafficking in baby parts has a fundamental flaw: It isn’t true, and it’s never been true. But it makes for a great sound bite.
Planned Parenthood: Fast facts and revealing numbers
The reason the facts don’t matter is that this whole episode is not about tissue donation or the Hyde Amendment governing federal funds for abortion or Medicaid reimbursements for physicians. It is about an ideological opposition to a woman’s right to choose by politicians who think they have a right to make women’s most personal, sensitive health care decisions for them.
Republicans have admitted at recent hearings that “(t)he issue is not whether there’s been a crime committed or not,” and one of our Senate colleagues recently noted, “(m)y focus is to try to deal with the life issue. Defunding Planned Parenthood is just a sideshow for the real event.”
The core issue is that Republican members of Congress now almost universally oppose abortion. An increasing number, like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, support banning abortion with no exemptions – not even in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the woman is threatened.
The majority of Americans disagree with these extreme views. Public opinion notwithstanding, the true reason for these politicians’ baseless attack on Planned Parenthood is their desire to take away a woman’s constitutional right to abortion.
Some of us are old enough to remember a time when abortion was illegal in much of America. We remember the thousands of women who died from unsafe abortions. We remember a society where male politicians had the authority to dictate a woman’s most personal and sensitive reproductive health care decisions. We remember a time when women made up less than 5% of the Congress and 0% of the Supreme Court.
We still have a long way to go to achieve equal rights for women – from equal pay for equal work, to paid family and medical leave, to full access for all women to contraceptive services. But we are here to say that on all of these issues, and on women’s health in particular, we refuse to go backward.
We need to recognize this fight for what it is. It is about banning a woman’s right to choose, and it is being driven by politicians who think they have the right to dictate to women about their most private health care decisions. We will do everything we can to stop this.
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